Trenton jazz/blues fest organizer working to pay musicians

TRENTON — The organizer of the Trenton International Jazz and Blues Festival said yesterday that she is working to pay performers whose paychecks bounced last week, but a number of the musicians said they still are waiting for compensation.

Organizer Annette Njie said some new donors have stepped forward in recent days. “There’s a lot of people coming in from the community who are taking care of some of this debt,” she said. “Within the next day or two we’ll have that done. We are working on it diligently.”

But five performers reached yesterday said they still had not been paid, and one said he had filed a small claims lawsuit to collect the $500 he is owed.

“I’m just coming from the Trenton courthouse,” said Edwin Estremera, leader of Machuco’s Trabuco. “This lady really, really jerked us around. She’s been not returning my phone calls, not returning my e-mails. It’s a lost case with her, I believe.”

Band leader Edgardo Cintron said he had filled out the forms to file a lawsuit, but held off after his manager told him that Njie had called and arranged to make a cash payment today.

“I said, listen, I really don’t want to talk to her,” Cintron said. “I said, I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt until tomorrow.”

In an interview Njie sought to emphasize the intended benefits of the new festival, which ran Sep. 17-19, such as a revived nightlife and livelier street culture in Trenton. She also said she intends to hold another festival next year.

But by her own admission, she was overwhelmed by the logistics of putting together a festival for the first time with little assistance.

“Just trying to put something together in a such short time was a big, big feat,” she said. “This was kind of going outside the box. There were a lot of lessons learned. We want to correct a lot of those, mainly the funding.”

“It takes a whole bunch of people to pull something like this off,” she said.

The event named four banks as sponsors, but Njie said she was still waiting for certain pledges to come in. She also indicated that she had expected to have ticket sales help cover the costs, rather than having funds available in advance front to pay the artists.

“It was a big chunk to take on without having all the resources, and also being somewhat dependent on attendance,” she said.

Tickets were $30 to attend one day of shows, or $50 for all three days. Njie did not say how much debt remained, but it appeared to be at least several thousand dollars. Cintron said he was owed $1,500.

Trombonist Clifford Adams, who is known for his work with Kool & the Gang and other groups, said he had tried to alert Njie to problems in the festival planning, particularly a lack of advertising in Trenton-area publications.

“I said, ‘The people I’ve spoken with don’t know anything about it,’” said Adams, who said his four-person combo played for an audience of just 15 people at the Mill Hill Saloon. “She said she had everything under control.”

He said Njie modeled the event after the Cape May Jazz Festival, but he noted that that festival has a large committee of organizers as well as volunteers to help run the event.

“The idea was a great idea, but you can’t coordinate a festival by yourself,” he said of the Trenton event. “The best person can’t do that. It’s a mammoth task to take on.”

Adams said there is a hunger for music in Trenton, as shown by the 1,800 people who attended a day-long show in Cadwalader Park that he helped organize in July. But that event, in addition to being free, was widely advertised in several small and medium-sized local publications.

“You can’t not to do marketing on a giant, three-day, 27 band event,” he said. “Some people do mega-marketing for one show, and still don’t break even.”

Njie attributed the poor attendance at her festival to insufficient spending on promotion, and to Trenton being in a “valley” between the media markets of New York and Philadelphia.

Njie said her company, Social Elegance, organized the festival, but she expects the nonprofit Trenton International Jazz and Blues Festival organization that she formed recently will take the lead next time. She plans to have a fundraiser within two months to raise seed money for the next festival, she said. She also wants to extend the festival into a series of events over several months and create a scholarship program.

Njie also serves on the boards of the city library and of the Trenton City Museum in Ellarslie Mansion, but said she was asked to step down from the museum board after the jazz festival’s financial problems were reported Saturday.